[fennecfoxen]

More specifically, a free market system can solve most problems it is applied to, given:

1. Property rights exist and are enforced. 2. There are minimal barriers to entry. 3. Transaction costs are low.

(#2 is of less interest here.)

The classic market failures all involve a violation of one of these. The tragedy of the commons is a property-rights failure, monopolies are a barrier-to-entry failure, and lots of other miscellaneous exploitation and big-corporate-player centralization issues are related to transaction-cost issues.

In this case, it's quite clear that property rights do not exist and are not enforced on things like the Atmosphere or the Ocean (good luck doing that internationally), and even if they did, imagine the transaction costs of tracking exactly how much in microbead pollution a given person has flushed down the drain? Anyone crying 'free market solution!' is being quite silly.

[pmoriarty]

Those three conditions are not enough.

What would prevent someone from, say, buying up all the water and then not selling any of it, or selling just a little to a handful of rich people?

What would happen to the rest of the people who couldn't afford any water?

[betteringred]

> What would prevent someone from, say, buying up all the water and then not selling any of it, or selling just a little to a handful of rich people?

First, no one has enough money to buy up all of the water. Second, even if they did, it wouldn't make sense not to sell it. Most people like making a profit and having more money. It wouldn't make sense to only sell it to wealthy people, because they don't use enough more water to exhaust supply in most places people inhabit and they'd be forgoing a lot of profit from selling water to normal people. Also governments also often sell water to politically connected business and agriculture groups at a lower rate than they sell to normal people.

[pmoriarty]

It sounds like you see profit as the sole motivation of people's actions.

If someone owned all the water, they would have not just profit-making potential, but they would have a lot of power. In particular, they would have the power of life and death over virtually everyone on the planet.

In a free market utopia, these people could kill as many people as they liked by simply refusing to sell them water, and believers in a completely free market wouldn't lift a finger to stop them -- because, after all they're just freely doing what they like with their own property.

The world is full of people with malicious motives. The prisons are full of them, and there are plenty more outside of prison. Wars, ethnic cleansings, and genocides have killed people by the millions. Some of this was done for profit motives, but some done for other motives.

Don't for a moment think that people like that would hesitate to use the power in their hands to harm those they hated or wanted dead for whatever reasons of their own.

Then there the sociopaths, who would let others die simply because they think giving them water would be worth their bother, or maybe because they were just more interested in other things.

Also, you don't have to buy up all the water in the world to be able to wreak havoc. All the water in a particular water-scarce region might be enough.

Of course, water is just an example and an analogy. The fact is that free market believers have very little to nothing except faith in the free market that would prevent the concentration of wealth and power (in whatever form) and the subsequent abuse of such at the whims of those who wield it.

[abstractbeliefs]

A world in which 100% of water was owned by a single (or several in a cartel) company would violate rule 2 - no easy barrier to entry.

If the barrier to entry were lower, another company would form to sell cheap water at high volume.

[pmoriarty]

It sounds like your interpretation of rule 2 would require everything being cheap enough for anyone to buy without the price being a burden on them.